IBM parades its capacity for show and tell

Lleyton Hewitt produces a shot heard around the world - courtesy of the technology that Australian Open sponsor IBM is showcasing at the tennis tournament.
Picture: AFP

When Lleyton Hewitt fired a 198 km/h ace past the racquet of Spaniard Rafael Nadal in the second set on Saturday, the shot ricocheted through 70 kilometres of data cabling beneath the tennis centre and around the world.

Tennis Australia statisticians were at the court recording the score and all those statistics, such as double-faults, aces, forced or unforced errors, forehands and backhands, on special laptops. They were tapping in how fast every serve was travelling - as measured by radar guns accurate to 1 per cent margins of error - and even where they landed.

The data was then sent to the IBM server room beneath the court, the place that IBM crews call "the Bat Cave". There, the server and network administrator Glyn Williams made sure it went out to the right places: the IBM team working the official website; closed-circuit television; scoreboards around Melbourne Park; the intranet used by media and players; and television broadcasters.

IBM, the world's biggest technology company, has been the official information-technology provider for the Australian Open for 12 years, and it is not shy about using the sponsorship to drum up more business.

Because tennis is such a statistics-heavy sport, IBM sees the Open as an opportunity to showcase its technology and sell more hardware, software and services to corporations.

These include systems that automatically allocate server capacity where it is needed and handle multiple workloads at the same time across a massive IT infrastructure.

So, as part of Big Blue's sales pitch, the infrastructure that runs the Australian Open website has been built to allow IBM to show clients it can simultaneously provide a financial services grid that handles credit analysis and an IBM research project that involves protein-folding experiments.

At the same time, the website provides real-time, point-by-point scores for every match. In the first six days, the site had 869,000 unique visitors and 39.38 million page views.

There were 1.7 million unique visitors to the site last year and 78 million page views.

Making sure the technology behind a sports event runs smoothly is a mammoth task and not without risk. IBM learned that the hard way when the 1996 Atlanta Olympics turned into a public relations disaster. Dubbed the Glitch Games, IBM's complex system for reporting results broke down in the first two days, resulting in huge delays. The system became riddled with bizarre statistical errors such as 95-year-old or 50-centimetre-tall boxers. Many journalists ditched the system in favour of the old-fashioned fax.

The company says it has learned its lessons from Atlanta. The Australian Open sponsorship is a chance again to demonstrate that so that it can stoke the sales of IBM products.